Killing Time

This is not an excursion into extreme popular art, as threatened at the conclusion of the previous post.  I'm not teasing, but that tour may yet come to a blog near you.  And though it may somewhat seem so, this is not even a rehearsal.  Still, I'm not just killing time, the times themselves are.  Hip hop with me to the beat of what passes for and passes away in everyday life.

At the bottom, where class hardens into caste, kids - little kids - Sunday's kids are being mowed down at play by Friday's kids in the process of slaughtering one another in the cramped caged coliseum confining furiously fatal fights impelled by  life's irresistible insistence to be realized.

Call it the underclass, the lumpen, the dissociated, the alienated, the marginalized, or whatever term of art you choose.  Just don't call it the problem. 

Let the puffed-up civil functionaries strut and strain and swear to solve that which can only be suppressed.  The Mayor, the Police Chief, and others are elected, appointed, and paid to pretend that the human horror show produced by the remorseless grind of a severely striated society can be closed down by yanking a few bad actors off stage.  But the huge cast of understudies anxious to audition for the starring parts are already made up.

And the theatre of poverty is growing and spreading by the day.  It's insinuating itself into the neighborhoods of the formerly more settled, genteel and restrained classes.  Folks who once were terrified by the idea that their kids were experimenting with marijuana, find themselves threatened by the bloody bluntness of violence and social decay.  Still, they find it easier to assail their fellow victims than to stand together against the common oppressor.

Hence, the Tea Party founding activists were motivated by an angry resentment towards those whom they believed had irresponsibly indebted themselves when the real estate market crashed.  This movement congealed to decry any demands for relief by these so-called scofflaws.  Similarly, the OWS activists have been pilloried by many of their peers for not just quietly accepting a life of limited and declining economic opportunity.  Be just like us, get over it, they say.  You really are just a bunch of spoiled brats.  The system was always top heavy and unjust.  We can't do anything about it.  Just shut-up, cry baby.

It is always easier to attack the powerless than to take on the power.  But what does that get you?  More of the same.